Monday, April 21, 2008

Pre-Made Scrapbook Page

I recently began a voyage into digital scrapbooking--wow! It's fun! No mess, either, and I love that. I use PSP8 anyway for other graphics work, and it's perfect for scrapbooking. I initially began with textures that I already had saved for other work, and that was fine. But a couple of weeks ago I discovered that there are free, ready to use scrapbook paper and elements and alphabets just waiting to be plugged in. The first thing I did was the yearbook pages for our homeschool group, and I did that much as I would do regular scrapping--cut and paste and muck around, and I really enjoyed it.
This evening, I thought I would try a pre-made layout, which is something that I would normally view as "cheating", but I thought maybe it would be a nice way to get something ready fast. And it was! It's really cute, perfect for the photos, and I have a completed page ready to be printed, and it took about 10 minutes to do. Here it is: (Click the picture to see the full-size page--if it doesn't load the first time and you get the title of the photo instead of a picture, go back and try again. There seems to be a glitch there.)
I don't think I'll always use pre-made pages, but I can definitely see the possibilities. This particular one is from Shabby Princess, a site with absolutely lovely, free materials. The alphabet I used is by Jennifer Riggins at Scrapbook Bytes. All of the pieces required a lot of resizing, because they are huge, and the original page was meant to be 12x12 and I resized it to be 7x10 because it makes a nice clean printout on standard 8.5x11 paper. I found the whole experience to be oddly liberating; it was really kind of nice to be able to ignore my usual desire to mess around with things as much as I normally would!

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